


Weight in the Shoulders, Flint in the Eyes

by BabylonsFall



Category: Leverage
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Self-Acceptance, Self-Hatred, extremely backgrounded-ot3 if you squint, pre-canon to post-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 01:29:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20685251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonsFall/pseuds/BabylonsFall
Summary: That guy - kid - he had God in his heart, and he had a flag on his shoulder. Clean hands. And I ain't seen him in the mirror in over 10 years. And believe me. I get up every morning looking for him. So you can trust me when I tell you, you pull that trigger, and two men die - the guy you kill... and the guy you used to be.A look through the years at the man Eliot sees in the mirror.





	Weight in the Shoulders, Flint in the Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> _Warning: While what's depicted is not explicitly the POV character dealing with dissociation/disassociation, as someone who deals with that, I recognize that it can read like it very easily. Take care of yourselves please!_
> 
> Okay so this has been rattling around in my head for awhile. It got to the point where I just had to get it out - no matter how it turned out.
> 
> That said, I do like how it turned out, and I hope you do too.

The uniform doesn’t fit.

Loose in the shoulders. Crisp in the joints, so it stretches along the flat planes of his arms and legs. Long in the legs, the ankles crumpled up around his boots.

The sun is just starting to peek through the cheap curtains, pale and dusty, stretching thin and weak onto a lumpy, dusty comforter. His bag’s packed and resting at the foot of the bed.

All that’s left is to grab it and go wait for the bus.

And all he can do is just. Stand there. Looking in the mirror.

The uniform doesn’t _fit_.

And he’s _ecstatic_.

Standing there in that cheap ass motel room, with soft light rounding out his edges in the mirror, in a uniform that doesn’t fit yet, Eliot can’t stop smiling.

This is _him_.

Bright blue eyes meet themselves in the mirror, and there’s a reflected smile he hasn’t been able to wipe off since he started putting the damn thing on. The cap doesn’t quite sit right, but that’s more because he can’t stop straightening everything out and every time he blinks, it’s crooked again.

The anxiety of the building week is still there, hooked behind his teeth and sitting heavy in his gut.

Aimee said goodbye two weeks ago, and Eliot _knows _it wasn’t supposed to sound so final to both of them. But it had fallen between them, and neither had really tried to move it again.

His dad hasn’t called.

But for the first time in a month, he can breathe around that weight in his stomach. Can smile around the pain and mean it.

The uniform doesn’t fit.

But it will.

One last grin to the boy in the mirror before he’s grabbing his bag and heading out to wait for the bus.

* * *

The uniform never really fits.

* * *

He’s in a motel somewhere. He’s not entirely sure _where_ \- can’t really find it in himself to care too much.

The sun outside is hot, baking scorched earth to a sear and scattering wisps of refracted almost-vapor along the cracked dirt and asphalt. There’s a grit to his breathing, and he’s not sure if it’s from the dirt outside seeping through every crack and crevice in the paper thin walls, or from the hangover he’s nursing.

Arizona? New Mexico maybe.

He’s not entirely sure how many state lines he crossed yesterday. He was in Utah the morning before, he knows that for sure. He’d gone south on the interstate and kind of just. Stopped paying attention.

The room isn’t anything special. One bed, one side table, a chair he’s pretty sure was stolen from a cafeteria somewhere, and a tv older than he is on a piece of furniture a little too beaten and worn to properly be called a dresser. There’s a small bathroom off to the side that’s a little rusted, but surprisingly clean.

And there’s a mirror. A full-length one, just to the right of the tv.

Why it’s _there_, he has no idea. But, then, there’s also a framed picture of...what’s he pretty sure is supposed to be a bowl of fruit hanging over the bed, that’s he been staring at upside down for the past hour.

He needs to get up. His body aches from sitting in a car all day yesterday, his head hurts from the shit and plentiful bar across the street that he’d practically camped at last night.

But he needs to get up. Keep moving.

He needs to get back home.

Groaning softly, Eliot pushes himself up, grimacing at the bright light he’s now at the perfect angle to squint at. Dragging a hand down his face, he hauls himself out of the bed, glancing around and taking a quick stock of...well, everything.

His bag’s on the chair where he tossed it. A couple change of clothes, his uniform folded and packed at the bottom, his discharge papers shoved into the side...it’s not a lot.

Besides the crumpled comforter and the bag, there’s no real evidence that anyone had been in the room.

He doesn’t know why his brain sticks on _that_, but it takes a good couple of minutes to get moving again.

Only to stop. Again.

In front of the mirror.

There’s something...weird. About it. Something his fried brain isn’t connecting. Frowning and squinting, he steps up to the mirror.

He’s as much of a mess as he feels like right now. Jeans crinkled and torn - the hole at the side of his shin is new though - long sleeve shirt a slept-in mess of wrinkles. He wants to blame the harsh light behind him for the sharp cut of his cheeks and the burnt look to his skin, but he can’t quite lie to himself that badly. It’s been a good long while since he’d cared if he burned under the sun or had enough in his stomach to do more than keep going.

His hair’s just starting to grow out of the short clip he’d gotten a couple weeks ago for his last show in his BDUs, curling where it’s not mashed down and bent at odd angles. He needs to get it cut again. Probably. Maybe.

...Why?

Shaking his head, he focuses back on the mirror. Something was still _off_.

It takes a long couple of minutes - standing there in the harsh light of a fading day, in a room no one’s been in - for him to start to understand.

He doesn’t recognize the man watching him back in the mirror.

Sure, Eliot’s seen himself, over the years. He recognizes where his weight falls as he stands there, recognizes the scar curling around and under his hairline, recognizes the clothes he picked up three days ago when he got off the plane.

He recognizes all of _that_.

But the man as a whole?

He’s a goddamn stranger. And what makes Eliot’s stomach curl on nothing, makes his teeth ache down into his jaw - he can’t remember when that man showed up.

He makes it to the bathroom before he starts heaving at least.

* * *

He doesn’t go home.

* * *

It’s not that he avoids mirrors after that.

If where he’s camped out has one, he takes a look every morning. Takes in the cut of his clothes. How his hair is growing out - how well it’s hiding that scar. Where his weight settles in his stance.

Looks for someone he’ll recognize.

Never quite manages to meet the eyes staring back at him.

* * *

He recognizes the man in the mirror, one morning.

Recognizes the heavy set to his shoulders. The black cloth stretched across them.

Recognizes the hard twist to his mouth. The paling bruises across his knuckles.

The hard glint in his eyes.

* * *

He didn’t run then. Knows he should have. Makes himself sick, remembering that the shock of _recognizing_ did...absolutely nothing.

* * *

What gets Eliot gone from under Moreau’s thumb wasn’t the shock of recognizing himself in the mirror.

Wasn’t realizing that he’d met his own eyes for the first time in eight years.

It was realizing he’d stopped looking for someone else.

* * *

He still doesn’t avoid mirrors.

But he’s...more careful, as the years march on.

Makes sure to watch the slope of his shoulders - looking for a hard line with no way to soften but to snap.

Keeps an eye on his hands - watching for bruises that stay and stay and stain.

Takes stock of the wrinkles around his eyes, and the ones around his mouth - keeping track of what’s added a new thin line and where.

Meets his own eyes. Lets them be bright with a laugh or soft with a smile. Lets them glint with anything but a knife’s edge.

* * *

He doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror again.

But he thinks he can. Eventually.

* * *

By the time he’s roped into a Mastermind’s convoluted crusade, with the worst actress he’s ever seen, a hacker with a brain too fast for his own good, and a thief who looks at skyscrapers a little too high with a little too much glee, he still doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror. Not completely.

But he likes him a little bit more.

* * *

Eliot _knows_ it’s a bad idea. Soon as he has it. But he has to _see. _Has to see what locking up Moreau does.

He makes it back to his apartment after the flight, after making sure everyone else made it home safely.

He...doesn’t know what he’s expecting.

Maybe lighter shoulders. Softer eyes. Some intangible _thing_ that he wouldn’t notice until it was gone.

A kid he doubt he’d even recognize.

But there’s...nothing. The harsh light of the bathroom shows nothing more than it should.

Just a man.

And Eliot hates what he sees in that moment - hates the man standing in front of him.

Hates the hair he’s put too much care into. Hands the hands that have lost the permanent calluses. Hates the mouth with deep lines echoing laughter long past.

Hates everything that shows he hasn’t done a single thing about Moreau in years.

Hates every little detail that says he moved on, when he had no right to.

Hates himself.

For the first time in years, he hates _himself_.

* * *

It sets him back a little, his breakdown in that dingy little bathroom, across the city from his team. His team. Who’s safe. Because the one man who could actually do them harm is locked away, for good.

He helped with that. _He _did that.

The man in the mirror isn’t completely lost.

* * *

He’s not lying when he tells Nate that he still gets up every morning, looking for the boy that once smiled alone at a uniform that didn’t fit.

Because he does. And it still hurts when he can’t find him.

It’s a pain he’s not sure he could articulate, even if he wanted to.

It still hurts - always will, he’s pretty sure. But there’s the pain you shy away from, because you’re bleeding and scared and there’s nowhere to go, and there’s the pain you lean into, because coming out the other side is a victory on it’s own.

So, no, he’s not lying when he tells Nate about that boy.

But the point he’s making isn’t about what died all those years ago - what might die tomorrow.

It’s about having a choice in the matter.

* * *

(He’s pretty sure that loophole Nate pulled with Latimer and Dubenich shouldn’t give any of them a clean slate.

But, then.

They had a choice too.)

* * *

By the time he’s helping shoo a giddy grifter and her besotted fiance out the door of the brewpub, all Eliot can do is smile at their backs, and roll his eyes at the overexcited hacker and thief he’s left with.

Their both bright in their excitement, all sweet smiles and delighted laughs, and Eliot can’t bring himself to actively ruin their fun.

He catches his reflection in the glass.

Can’t bring himself to ruin his own smile either.

* * *

A few months later, he takes one last look in the mirror before going to bed.

He recognizes the man staring back at him, with messy hair, a shirt that doesn’t quite fit right - too long in the torso, too thin in the shoulders, with a graphic he doesn’t quite understand - hands without any bruises, but with a small burn along the outside that’s well on it’s way to being healed - he’s told them not to sneak up on him while he’s cooking. There’s a hairbrush that’s not his resting by the sink, and a towel hanging haphazardly over the shower rod for another moment before it crumples to the floor.

He recognizes the man in the mirror.

And he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Kudos and comments are always loved and greatly appreciated!


End file.
